An example of why gun control doesn't work: India

[Atypical Liberal]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101214/india-illegal-guns-gun-control-crime

"Even more troubling, local experts say illegal factories produce a huge number of pistols and machine guns every year. In many places, police say, a so-called "katta" or country-made weapon, costs as little as $10, and picking one up is as easy as buying paan, the betel nut-based stimulant ubiquitous in the subcontinent."

"His best products, with barrels sourced from Rampur, another district in Uttar Pradesh, could be fired three times in rapid succession without overheating, and they never exploded in a customer's hand. He sold them for between $50 and $100, compared with nearly $2,000 for a simple legal .32 caliber revolver made by one of India's official, government-owned ordnance factories."

The technology is literally ancient, and these folks are turning out firearms with vary basic tools, even though it is illegal.

[old mark]

1. As recently proven in Canada as well, if people really want something,

they will get it...and only law abiding people obey the laws.

Link;Canadian gang shooting December 13th... - 10 shot:
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/12/13/16535856.html



mark

[Larkspur]

5. So why bother having any laws at all?

Scrap the murder laws, the burglery laws, etc. just let the gunholder decide who lives and who dies. We'll all be Ethiopia and Mexico then.

[friendly_iconoclast]

8. Mexico has stricter gun laws than the US. Which country has more violent crime?

And which country has certain cities that make the South Bronx of the 1970's look like Sunnybrook Farm?

[old mark]

23. FBI states that violent crime in US is lowest in 30 years...with all those

concealed carry permits and people carrying guns, yet....no bloodbath, less crime...

Yeah, I know - no connection...:rofl:



mark

[PavePusher]

10. Way to jump straight to the hyperbolic strawman.

Laws, in and of themselves, seldom stop people from doing anything.

But they set up the legal conditions for punishing those who unneccesarily or spitefully harm others.

Laws are primarily about punishment and recompense, not prevention.

[Euromutt]

19. You're failing to distinguish between "malum in se" and "malum prohibitum"

Malum in se is Latin for "a wrong in (and of) itself"; these are actions whereby you directly inflict physical or material harm on an unwilling victim, such as homicide, rape, assault, theft, etc.
Malum prohibitum means "a wrong (because it is) prohibited"; these are actions that not intrinsically harmful, but are prohibited because they are deemed to create an unacceptably high risk of a malum in se taking place. For example, DUI does not directly harm anyone, but is prohibited because it creates a high risk of vehicular manslaughter, destruction of property, et al. Ditto for other forms of reckless driving, reckless endangerment, and the bulk of laws regulating the transfer and possession of firearms.

A law prohibiting a malum in se does not need justification, since it outlaws (and provides for punishment for committing) a wrong in itself. A law prohibiting something that is not a malum in se does need to be justified: Is the risk it is intended to avert worth the price in restriction of citizens' freedoms? Can the law actually be enforced effectively, i.e. will there actually be a payoff in increased public safety for the restriction of citizens' freedoms?

Because of the distinction between malum in se and malum prohibitum, and the laws against each, the notion of abolishing restrictions against murder, burglary, etc. are not the logical extreme of relaxing, or even abolishing entirely, restrictions on private possession of firearms. They are two distinct issues.

[SteveM]

34. Laws reflect social policy which address real societal concerns...

...not the desire by some to punish or "get back" at some "culture" or despised "other." Using the law as validation of your morals or beliefs is not only bad policy, but sets the stage for conflict in other spheres as well.

Crime rates? Murder rates? Accidental shootings? Few if any of the current gun laws have been shown effective in addressing these problems. Some practices such as locking up your weapon when not at home are now widespread, and have effectively lowered gun-related childhood deaths -- but no law was passed instituting this practice. And by now, you are surely aware that the overall crime rate, as well as the homicide rate in this country, have been declining over the last 15 years, even as the number of guns in civilian hands has gone up in that time frame by at least 100,000,000. This data does not prove that "more guns = less crime," but refutes the oft-chanted "more guns = more crime" slogan used by gun banners for years.

I cannot speak to Ethiopia, but Mexico may very well benefit from OUR scrapping the laws against the use and sale of illegal drugs. What do you think?

[PoliticAverse]

2. The gun markets of Pakistan...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpURk1E3Q9c

[Arctic Dave]

3. Anyone can make a zap gun.

Probably not going to find a lot of poeple commiting mass homicide with them tough.

Where do they get the bullets?

[Atypical Liberal]

4. It's easy to manufacture ammo.

From the article:

"In the beginning, Sanjay's crew made cartridges with gunpowder sourced from a local company licensed to make firecrackers and fuses contrived from feathers rolled with carbon and chemicals found in detergent and other household products."

Lead is easily acquired.

Brass can be harder but is also not difficult to manufacture.

All of this can be done with very primitive machine shops.

>Anyone can make a zap gun. Probably not going to find a lot of poeple commiting mass homicide with them tough.

You can find plans on the internet to make a bona-fide Sten gun out of scrap metal. That is a 9mm submachine gun. The AK47 is made largely out of sheet metal and some simple machined parts.

[wikileaksfan]

6. India has a lower murder rate than the USA

Gun regulation might not be perfect but it's better than the alternative. Japan has virtually no murder, check out the chart below.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

[Atypical Liberal]

7. The alternative.

The alternative is law-abiding people not having the means to defend themselves. That is trading freedom for security, and that is not a better alternative, to me.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin, 1759

[provis99]

12. nonsense. Use your fists to defend yourself.

Or run away from a criminal.

[PavePusher]

14. 1. What if I am physically unable to do either?

Are you volunteering your services to provide security?

2. What moral or ethical imperative exists that I must not resist or stop a criminal in her/his actions to me? Why should I not provide an incentive to change their lifestyle?

[Atypical Liberal]

15. Are you being sarcastic?

I can't tell if your response is sarcasm or not.

First of all, I find the idea that I should flee from a criminal morally repugnant, especially if I am in my own car, or in my own home.

Secondly, not everyone is physically able to overpower an assailant. This is why man invented tools - to overcome his physical limitations. We don't expect people to use their hands to dig holes or pound nails. Why should I have to defend myself or my family that way?

Moreover, the right to keep and bear arms is not just for protection against common criminals, but also for protection against organized oppression. Using fists or running away was not an option for our founders.

[east texas lib]

16. Use a gun to defend to defend yourself...

Let the criminal do the running. Who knows, if you do your job properly the criminal will never do much of anything again.

[X_Digger]

9. And our NON-gun murder rate is higher than Japan's total..

Assuming you squinted real hard and twitched your nose and all guns disappeared, and no criminals would choose another weapon, we'd _still_ have a homicide rate higher than many of those same countries..

Bulgaria, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Spain, Chile, New Zealand- all have a TOTAL homicide rate lower than our NON-firearm homicide rate.

Of course, the other thing interesting about your statement is that in Japan, what we would call a murder-suicide is frequently recorded as a group suicide- boshi-shinjyu (mother-child suicide), fushi-shinju (father-child suicide), or ikka-shinnjyu (family suicide).

http://www.japanpsychiatrist.com/Abstracts/Shinju.html

[PavePusher]

11. Do you have evidence to demonstrate...

that registration prevents murder (or any other crimes)?

Please explain this mechanism.

[PavePusher]

13. Due to incredibly strict laws...

and a very ridged cultural structure, Japan has very few guns in civilian hands. This is a historical trend since the 1500's.

http://books.google.com/books?id=4Ete0zPAnjwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=giving+up+the+gun&source=bl&ots=YQpOyUDzwH&sig=JzM0ZXFyme92XrgUPZTlHeeOSZU&hl=en&ei=JT4eTd70C8P38AaSp5nqDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&sqi=2&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Has almost nothing to do with registration.

[lawodevolution]

18. Yet rates of violent killings are much higher in Japan than in the USA

Add up suicide and murder rates you will find that the Japanese are very good at killing and the number of people killed in Japan by the direct action of a human being is much higher than in the USA, they just happen to be violent to the self more than other people. And they don't even have guns

[lawodevolution]

17. "6. India has a lower murder rate than the USA"

And India has the 2nd largest civilian arsenal in the world. Also Nigeria and Haiti both have almost no civilian owned guns yet are violent countries with strong gun control. In 2010 a mass violence event resulted in 500 dead in Nigeria compare that to Virginia tech and they did it with machetes.

[Euromutt]

20. Japan has plenty of murder; it just doesn't get counted as such

As X_Digger alluded, but perhaps did not make explicitly clear, the Japanese authorities tend to count all victims of domestic murder-suicides as having committed suicide. In the United States, if some guy murders his wife and two children and then tops himself, that's three murders and one suicide; in Japan, such a scenario would be counted as a quadruple suicide.

In addition, the Japanese police really suck at conducting criminal investigations (which is one reason why almost all criminal convictions rely on the defendant's confession, tortured out of him if necessary http://www.economist.com/node/8680941), so in cases where there's a body but no obvious suspect to beat a confession out of, Japanese police tend strongly to rule the death a suicide so they can close the case (http://www.glocom.org/special_topics/social_trends/20040120_trends_s67/index.html). In one particularly egregious case in 1980, a victim was ruled to have tied his own hands and feet and thrown himself off a dam into the reservoir below.

So that goes quite a long way to explaining how Japan has such a low homicide rate, and such a high suicide rate.

[Katya Mullethov]

21. But they sure do like to kill themselves

Who woulda thought ! Go figure right ?

[Straw Man]

22. Emulating Japan

Gun regulation might not be perfect but it's better than the alternative. Japan has virtually no murder, check out the chart below.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-...

Yes, Japan's murder rate is low, but still higher than that of Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Hmmm... I wonder what we could learn from them in terms of public policy.

[Name removed]

28. Deleted message

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[timo]

24. mexico has stricter gun law

and the murder rate their is off the hizzzooookkkk

[wikileaksfan]

27. Mexico, Columbia and nations worse than USA coming out of civil war,

exploded empires or going into civil wars, kind of proves my point. I think many of the pro gun people secretly long for civil war or hope it really never ended, look at how many of them acted badly over Obama being elected.

[friendly_iconoclast]

29. I think many of the anti gun people secretly long for a rise in the murder rate.

See, I can defame an entire group of people, too!

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

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[Euromutt]

33. Curiously, you might be onto something, sorta kinda

There's a tendency among certain members of the environmental movement--by no means all, but some--to react with dismay to indications that some threat to the environment has been successfully staved off, because for them, protecting the environment is not an end, but a means toward their agenda, which is to remodel society on a more "sustainable" "back to the land" template (the kind of people who wax all lyrical about Walden, and resent it when you point out that Thoreau spent more than half his life suffering from TB until it finally killed him at age 44, and that if he'd lived a hundred years later, antibiotics would have cured him). But you're not going to get people to give up their cars just because you have an aversion to cars (or at least, other people's cars), so it needs to presented as being essential to avert environmental disaster.

That's not to say the environmental movement hasn't raised some valid concerns over the years, and been invaluable in getting some genuine problems addressed and solved, but to some extent, it's become a victim of its own success, in that its influence wanes with every environmental hazard that is effectively addressed. And so the particular people under discussion keep looking for new things to worry about, and frequently overstate the potential for harm.

What I'm getting at, in this roundabout fashion, is that I suspect that there are people in the gun control movement who have a similar mindset: they're motivated not so much by concerns about violence, but by an aversion to firearms. As a result, while they don't actually desire a rise in the murder rate, they don't welcome any reduction in violent crime rates if it cannot be attributed to a gun control measure, because it might lead the general public to think that restricting private ownership of firearms isn't the key to reducing violent crime.

[Euromutt]

32. How about the Baltic republics?

That is, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All three are hardly basket cases, given that they managed to become EU member states well over six years ago. Nevertheless, all three still have higher homicide rates than the U.S. does. Russia's is even worse, which isn't just a result of post-Soviet developments, because even during the last two decades of the Soviet era (as the archives have since revealed), the Soviet homicide rate was never below the American one, and often significantly higher.

And Brazil and Jamaica haven't had any empires falling apart (explosively or otherwise), nor any civil wars lately. They do have sizable problems with drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs), not unlike Mexico and indeed, many major American cities. Wherever you have severe socio-economic inequality, young men whose opportunities for social and economic advancement are practically non-existent will be drawn to crime, and drug trafficking is the biggest racket.

[SteveM]

35. "...many of the pro gun people secretly long for civil war..." Culture war...

would best describe the motivations of the "anti-gun people," and your statement kind of proves the point.

It is always easy to attribute social evils to groups when those groups are seen as "the Other." And the Other is what prohibitions/culture war are about. I hope you will see that the war on guns, or on gays, or on ganja, or on abortion, or on alcohol, or on tobacco, or on most anything which utilizes prohibitionism as the instrumentality of policy is doomed not only to failure but wide-spread adverse consequences which stretch far beyond the thing or practice prohibited. The War on Drugs is bad enough, but now we have a literal war on our border, yet MSM spends less time questioning continuing drug prohibition than with trying to force-fit another of their favorite prohibitions onto the problem: gun-control.

[DissedByBush]

25. Sten Gun

Designed so that any decent machine shop can turn one out in five man-hours of work.

[Euromutt]

26. During WWII, the Danish, Norwegian and Polish resistance made their own

During the late 1940s, both the Indonesian nationalists and the (Jewish) Haganah in Palestine used locally produced Sten guns as well. In both the case of Denmark and Indonesia, hundreds were manufactured in bicycle repair shops, and rural Indonesian bicycle repair shops in the 1940s were not what you'd call "state of the art" by present-day American standards.

[Katya Mullethov]

30. The Ayalon Institute was making 40,000 rounds of 9mm a day to feed them

Down a hole in the floor of a laundry servicing British officers .


"There is an interesting story about how copper, the raw material that was needed, was obtained. Applications for import licenses were submitted to the authorities. When asked why so much copper was needed the explanation was given that it would be used to make lipstick cases. The explanation seemed plausible and the import licenses were approved."

[SteveM]

36. "Iver Johnson Gun & Cycle Works." nt

[Xenotime]

37. Guns are only deadly if used for their intended purpose...

other than that they are perfectly safe.